mikesparts
Plastic
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2017
Hey guys first post but have been creeping around, soaking in the knowledge for a while. I am an engineer at a very small manufacturing center and our machining group runs three HAAS turning centers (DS 30's). We geared up for high throughput and automation when purchasing the equipment so they all have bar feeders, parts catcher, Fanuc interfacing, rotary accumulators etc. We're about 6 months into production and things are starting to pick up in all areas of our facility except for machining. We're struggling to hit 60% uptime on the turning centers and most of this is due to changing over between runs. We got pretty good at making a few different widgets over the last few months but now as we try to introduce new widgets with even the slightest variation of the ones we already make it is stopping us dead in our tracks. Our business seems to be going in the direction of lower volume higher margin items so this downtime is becoming more common and it's killing us. Also a note, we make VERY basic turned parts, 75% of our machining is center drilling 2" round 1018, milling a flat across it and parting it off.
We've been using Autocad LT and manually programming the machines to get us going, knowing that we would eventually be upgrading and with all this downtime it looks like that time us upon us. We've been meeting with vendors and are leaning toward Solidworks and looking for a CAM software to pair with it. Does anyone have any experience or recommendations for a software that is geared toward high production and can incorporate these auxiliary processes like barfeed, handoff, parts catch etc? Nobody seems to be able to tell us with any confidence that the product they are repping can do these things.
We've been using Autocad LT and manually programming the machines to get us going, knowing that we would eventually be upgrading and with all this downtime it looks like that time us upon us. We've been meeting with vendors and are leaning toward Solidworks and looking for a CAM software to pair with it. Does anyone have any experience or recommendations for a software that is geared toward high production and can incorporate these auxiliary processes like barfeed, handoff, parts catch etc? Nobody seems to be able to tell us with any confidence that the product they are repping can do these things.